Julia Hoffman (2012)
Dr. Julia Hoffman is a live-in psychiatrist at Collinwood in order to treat young David Collins, who is believed by the Collins family to be suffering from delusions. She is portrayed by Helena Bonham Carter. Biography Dr. Julia Hoffman is a woman who seems to have grown bitter of life, unhappy that she's aging and there's nothing she can do about it. She becomes such a severe alcoholic, her hangovers become legendary. Either before or after she starts drinking, she is hired by Elizabeth Collins Stoddard to be a live-in psychiatrist at Collinwood for a month to help her nephew David recover from the death of his mother. Julia ends up staying for three years. One day she joins the family for breakfast and is introduced to Barnabas Collins, a distant relative from England who is amazed at the idea of a female doctor. She can only stare, demanding to know if he's for real. Some time later, she catches him staring oddly at the red lava-lamp in Carolyn's room and decides that its time for her to practice her psychiatry on him. She places him under hypnosis for hours and discovers that Barnabas is a vampire, born in the eighteenth century. Julia bursts into Elizabeth's office and demands to know why she didn't say anything about their new guest being a murdering vampire, for crying out loud. Elizabeth calms her down, encouraging her to keep the secret and simply take the opportunity to be scientifically fascinated with a real vampire. Julia devises an experiment with Barnabas that may bring back his humanity through a series of blood transfusions, although she doesn't know why he would want to give up his immortality and eternal youth. He courteously compliments her beauty, stirring her into giving him a very physical reward. Julia surmises that if human blood transfusions will cure Barnabas of his vampirism, transfusing his vampiric blood to herself will make her an immortally youthful vampire. So, instead of transfusing his blood with her own, she takes his blood to use for herself. When Barnabas unexpectedly visits her lab to redouble their efforts, he finds her hooked up to an IV with his blood and is absolutely furious. He angrily attacks her and drains her of blood in less than five seconds. During the assault, she is shown to have vampiric incisors. Barnabas and handyman Willie Loomis wrap Julia's body in a weighted canvas and dump her into the Atlantic waters off Collinsport, watching her vivid red hair sink into its murky depths. Days later, at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean, Julia is shown engulfed in a school of fish which dart away when she opens her eyes, flashing her vampiric teeth. Trivia * Helena Bonham Carter herself played a Witch, and a spectacularly evil one at that, in the Harry Potter films: Bellatrix Lestrange. * Julia often wears brightly-colored mod prints to reflect the time period of the early seventies. * Tim Burton has an interesting habit of having Johnny Depp's character kill off Helena Bonham Carter's character in many movies they've filmed together. * The signature red hair of Grayson Hall's depiction of Julia is exaggerated in this version by using a bright, primary red hair color. * Matthew Hall, son of the original Julia, Grayson Hall, and also one of the writers on the 1991 revival series, has observed in blog comments (http://msbhall.wordpress.com) on the film that the movie "conflates original series Julia’s knowledge of Barnabas’s vampirism with the Elizabeth Collins Stoddard role," making Elizabeth the staunch ally to Barnabas that Julia had been in the original series, perhaps making the film's Julia more expendable as one of Barnabas' victims. He goes on to say that while he enjoyed Tim Burton’s movie, Burton "does trash Julia into near-unrecognizability. (My mother, short and fat and drinking anything besides black tea first thing in the morning? Sorry, you must have the wrong Dr. Hoffman.)" Category:Dark Shadows (2012) Characters Category:Vampires Category:Females Category:Deceased